How Procurement Enables Life-Saving Drug Research and Discovery

Acquiring and managing chemicals and other materials for research is a highly regulated venture subject to a level of scrutiny seldom seen outside this industry. Many items required for research pose health, security and environmental risks. Ensuring OSHA, Department of Homeland Security, and DEA compliance for these items requires oversight of the purchasing process to certify proper approvals and compliance with reporting limits. When you think about what is on the line with this research – the discovery of critical new drugs – the ability to use and manage these materials efficiently and cost-effectively becomes even more crucial.

Integrating Chemical Management with Purchasing Boosts Efficiency

Research organizations can simplify this process by integrating chemical inventory management and purchasing solutions. Our partnership with eMolecules allows this to happen. Our Enterprise Reagent Manager (ERM) solution helps life science organizations and higher education institutions purchase building blocks and manage chemical inventories more efficiently. By integrating our ERM solution with eMolecules’ catalog of in-stock molecular reagents, ERM users have access to data for over 650,000 in-stock and verified building blocks from a network of over 200 suppliers that are available through a single supplier at negotiated discount pricing.

Save Time and Money – Even on Specialty Building Blocks

Opportunity comes even before the purchase. Re-use of in-house inventory provides faster access to chemicals and reduces procurement, carrying, and disposal costs of redundant inventory by as much as 15 percent of annual chemical spend. Use of preferred suppliers enhances contract compliance and reduces purchase costs by as much as 10 percent of annual chemical spend. EHS and regulatory approvals, tracking, and reporting built into the process improve compliance and inventory accuracy. Streamline all chemical inventory capturing and tracking activities to reduce data entry, errors and overhead.

While preferred suppliers may address as much as 80 percent of sourcing needs, directing spend to them can be challenging. The other 20 percent – the specialty “building block” chemicals that reduce synthesis time and cost – necessitate short-term relationships with many non-strategic suppliers. These suppliers are located all over the world and require more intensive (and costly) manual procurement efforts.

Traditionally, searching and sourcing of molecular building blocks is expensive and time consuming for researchers because they are dealing with hundreds of small specialty suppliers. Purchasing and delivery are also subject to high costs, delays and quality issues. Through the integration with eMolecules, ERM customers gain instant access to building blocks that are available and ready to be shipped, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

There are many point solutions for tracking – from simple chemical inventory spreadsheets to more sophisticated inventory management systems – but many of them ultimately fail because they get involved too late in the process (after chemicals have already arrived on-site) or they impose additional overhead and cost on research organizations without delivering value in return. Researchers get REAL value through an integrated solution that covers the full research cycle – beginning with a researcher’s exploratory search for materials and the sourcing decision – with compliance built in throughout the process. Researchers are then able to gain productivity while their purchasing and EHS compliance improve.

This gain in productivity continues to drive the discovery and development of new drugs that save lives — and save money in the process.